Is Dungeon Plunder a turn-based "I move, enemies move" roguelike? Hard to tell from the screenshots and description.

Not at all. You wander an overworld with static enemies. Engaging one of them starts a battle system with revolves (no pun intended) around a slot machine mechanic, similar to King Cashing. There's nothing really rogue-like about it.

Is Dungeon Plunder a turn-based "I move, enemies move" roguelike? Hard to tell from the screenshots and description.

Not at all. You wander an overworld with static enemies. Engaging one of them starts a battle system with revolves (no pun intended) around a slot machine mechanic, similar to King Cashing. There's nothing really rogue-like about it.

It feels very much like a rogue-like to me, just with combat being slot machine driven.

Is Dungeon Plunder a turn-based "I move, enemies move" roguelike? Hard to tell from the screenshots and description.

Not at all. You wander an overworld with static enemies. Engaging one of them starts a battle system with revolves (no pun intended) around a slot machine mechanic, similar to King Cashing. There's nothing really rogue-like about it.

It feels very much like a rogue-like to me, just with combat being slot machine driven.

Me neither. It really doesn't seem like one at all, yet it feels like it while playing. If the monsters were more distinct (which the dev has already indicated an interest in doing) and there were more loot diversity, that would contribute to the feeling even more.

I thought that Ridiculous Fishing was a ripoff of Ninja Fishing, but from poking around it seems it's the other way around. Ninja Fishing ripped off the predecessor to Ridiculous Fishing, Radical Fishing. I have never said the word fishing so many times in one sentence.

People are raving about this game being so awesome over at TA, but I completely don't get it.

Three stages:

1) Tilt your phone to steer the lure on the way down into the water. You're trying to avoid everything so you can get as deep into the water as you can.

2) Once you snag something, you're now trying to snag as much as you can on the way up, and the most high value fish you can get.

3) When you get back to the surface, all the fish you snagged then get launched into the air. I guess you touch them to shoot them with a shotgun? This is where it more drastically departs from Ninja Fishing. In Ninja Fishing it just turns into Fruit Ninja at this point.

Pinball Arcade released its next pinball pack for $4.99. It contains Cactus Canyon (video) and Central Park.

Cactus Canyon is basically like Blazing Saddles the pinball game - a humorous take on westerns. It has an interesting history. This was the last dot matrix display game Bally/Williams created. This was during the downswing of pinball games in arcades and Bally was invested in the Pinball 2000 games, that had monitors instead of DMDs and the hologram type effects, to try and turn things around (didn't work). In fact the team building this table was disbanded before it was 100% complete. So it's missing a bit of polish, like there's no fun free game match video or sound and it looks like the Bionic Bart mode never got completed, but its fully playable. It's also a rare table with only 900 units shipping. I played a bunch of it on Visual Pinball and its a lot of fun. After trying this version I won't be going back to the VP one.

Central Park is another electro magnetic table, similar to Top Shot and Genie. This one is a drain monster though. There's double drains on either side of the flippers and the flippers are pretty far apart making drains easy down the middle. It looks like you really need to nudge a lot to keep the ball in play and nudging on the iOS just isn't that great. So not sure how much I'll play this one.

Some additonal improvements with this release including the "update all tables" button which will just automatically update the tables to the latest version. Before each release you had to go through the tables one by one to update them.

Sounds like Pinball Aracde will be making it to Steam at some point. A long time coming - but of course that just means now I'm going to have to buy the tables twice now. Ugh.

Central Park is another electro magnetic table, similar to Top Shot and Genie. This one is a drain monster though. There's double drains on either side of the flippers and the flippers are pretty far apart making drains easy down the middle. It looks like you really need to nudge a lot to keep the ball in play and nudging on the iOS just isn't that great. So not sure how much I'll play this one.

Ok Central Park is actually pretty cool. You actually don't need to nudge much at all to have a good game. There's two phases to this table.

1) Advance the yellow and green target values so they're both set to Special.

2) Enjoy the hell out of the table racking up tons of free balls and points

Basically once you get the specials lit, and they stay lit, you can earn free balls pretty easily. I'm actually not sure what shots earn them but I was basically earning a free ball by the time I would lose a ball - which was frequently. It actually made the table fun as hell.

So it's worth sticking with till you pass phase 1 to open up the table.

I'm really enjoying Pixel Kingdom. I thought the retro graphics might be too much but they actually work out quite well. This is one of those lane defending games (is there a genre name for this?) along the lines of Plants vs Zombies. What sets it apart are the RPG elements and the kind of endless leveling mechanic. You have access to 8 different unit types (which you can choose to level up and provide single gear boosts to) at a time from a selection of about 15ish or so. Unlocking a new class requires gold, which you earn through playing the game. Leveling a class up requires gems which are given every once in a while. The game starts free to of course gold and gems are IAP. This is one of those games that the IAP actually is kind of a detriment to the game design in the sense that the "fun" of the game is iherently in the grinding/leveling aspect. I would love to support the developers, but prefer the game elements be left as is and then have IAP to unlock different skins or graphics or something else. Aside from that, it's freakishly addictive in its deceptive simplicity; it's fun to see how the classes work in combination with each other. I haven't unlocked any of the more expensive classes yet but I look forward to seeing how they mix with the classes I use the most. Thus far I've been very successful using the Monk as a tank, Dragoon as quick fodder, Mage as primary damage and the Cleric for occasional healing.

Dungeon Hunter 4 just came out. Gameplay is solid but it's yet another "free" game filled with IAP insanity which I think may be a turnoff to most.

For turn-based lovers, I'm really enjoying Kingturn, which also just released. It's kind of like a low budget Fire Emblem (no cutscenes, etc), but that's very close to what I've been craving on the iPhone/iPad. OH, and you can turn the music off lol!

Dude, Kingturn is HARD. I'm playing on the default difficulty and the first optional mission in the cave is kicking my ass. Needless to say, everyone remotely interested in Fire Emblem-ish TBS should get this immediately.

DH4 is gorgeous. I wish they'd make a non-IAP-based game that looked like that.

Yeah I highly recommend Kingturn to anyone who likes these type of fantasy TBS games. It may seem a little stripped down at first relative to Fire Emblem, but in some ways I think it's an even better game. And yes, as Misguided said, even the "casual" difficulty can be challenging.

While there's a loose story going on to thread the scenarios, it's really just about playing each map, leveling/equipping your party members, choosing which to deploy (when you can), and beating a pretty tough AI. You can tell there's some influence from Game of Thrones, so it's possible the "plot" will become more interesting as it goes further, but really it doesn't matter that much. The gameplay is the thing here.

What sets it apart strategically from FE is that instead of set scripted kind of scenarios, the way the battles play out is almost strictly about your gameplay and strategic choices. In FE, re-enforcements can be triggered by the scripting or moving to a spot or killing someone etc. - sometimes winning a scenario boils down to memorizing when things are going to happen and not trigger them until you are ready. In this game, every map has a number of "tents" which are essentially spawn/heal camps. You are limited in how many active numbers you can use at a time (like FE), but unlike FE, if one goes down, as long as you control the tent and there are resources available, you can bring in someone else up to the fixed maximum. If you can capture an enemy tent, you get a +1 to how many units you can use, so it's absolutely a huge deal to defend your own tent while taking others. Sometimes it comes down to a war of attrition; the AI system is based on a percentage as to whether or not they can get another unit. As I understand it, the more you kill a unit, the less percent chance it has of coming back, but often enough it feels like they have unlimited resources.

In some ways it can become a big game of cat and mouse, feint and counter-feint. Unlike most TBS games, there are times when it's better to NOT kill off an enemy so that they can't spawn out a new character to protect a tent you are going after (they are also limited in their overall numbers). Sometimes you have to "fake" going for a tent, see if/how the AI reacts, and then either pull back or push forward depending on what it does. The AI is really pretty amazing at times, it seems to know what I'm doing and counter it effectively. Maybe sometimes it's my imagination but it even seems to do things like deliberately sacrifice units so that it can bring out another one to defend.

War of Eclipse (hard to describe, it's by the tower of fortune guys, which also have Gargoyle Ruins coming out in a couple days)Rivals at War for mindless funPuzzle N DragonsPixel KingdomHero Mages (turn based tactical with card based magic)

Pinball Arcades April tables are out. It's a great mix. Whitewater (1993) and Space Shuttle (1984). Whitewater will likely get the most buzz as it's one of the more popular pinball tables. It has a pretty neat left ramp where the ball goes up and down then loops around the flipper, a whirlpool, and a Bigfoot. The theme is a humorous white water rafting adventure. Space Shuttle has been in the Williams Collection before but is still loads of fun with really fast gameplay. The table makes it feel like your working towards a multitball that will award you tons of points. If you really want to see how to play Space Shuttle take a peak at this Space Shuttle Video - I never even knew you could trap multiple balls on the flipper like this. I've been trying to master that on other tables since I watched that video last week with some limited success.

Pinball Arcade also got Greenlit for Steam. They're saying late April or early May for it to appear on there. Not sure what tables are going to be made available off the bat but it won't be all of them. The PC team wasn't working on tables while the Greenlight process delayed the release - understandable.

If you're interested in more real pinball tables I'll also reccomend another app, Zaccaria Pinball. Zaccaria was a popular pinball maker in Italy in the 80's. Most of the tables never made it too far out of Europe so for me they were almost all unfamiliar (I did happen to play Time Machine at the Midwest Gaming Classic). But they are high quality tables for the time but a bit more basic than what you would see from Williams, Bally and Stern during this time. The tables do have a neat feature to them where during the 3rd ball you can build up this bonus time which will count down during a 4th ball which you can use to boost your score. Pretty neat.

They plan on releaseing something like 29 tables for the app and have 4 out currently. The best of the bunch right now is Pinball Champ - which unfortunatly is having some lag issues on it (even on a iPad 3/4). But the other tables are pretty decent too. There's also a night mode you can purchase for the tables. This is a must as the tables look fantastic when the lights are turned off. Their last update added some pretty decent physics to the ball movement. While isn't quite good as Pinball Arcade at the moment it is still pretty decent. One thing their physics does have over PA is they managed to do ball spin!

The developer seems commited to improving the App so I sprung for their Gold pack ($35) which nets everything including all tables they will release. There is a Silver pack for a bit less that nets all 29 tables (as they are released) and a Bronze pack for a lot less which just includes things like the night mode, different balls, and fippers (last two are not worth it). You can also just buy things piecemeal. They're worth checking out if you want more pinball.

I've been playing a ton of Zen Pinball over the last month (mainly the Epic Quest table). I'm not a big Marvel fan, but their tables are all pretty fun and unique. I'm finally starting to figure out the Bobs Fett table, which has baffled me for since release.

Switched back to Pinball Arcade today for a change of pace and was amazed at the difference in ball physics. It was quite difficult to make the switch back. Oddly, I beat my previous high score on two tables: by 20 million on Monster Bash and nearly double (80mil) on Medieval Madness. I had the final castle down to only one more hit on the gate to open it when I center drained.